I'm pretty confused.
I haven't seen or heard much about this game in months, and in checking it out again, it looks from various posts I've read that the game is either released, where you must pay and subscribe in order to play, or in beta (only a month ago a post was made requesting more testers on the official announcements subforum, but the form now seems dead/blocked). It sounds like this week updates are going in that seem like basic core features (such as item decay), which helps confuse me in figuring out the state of the game.

So.. anyone able to clarify? My best guess is this is an unpolished release, ala minecraft's incredibly long paid-for beta, designed to help test and fund the full-featured (non-prelude?) release of the game?

If that's where we are, that's all good. For something intending to be a sandbox, I can dig on that. It's a little higher priced then I would have expected for something in that state, but again I'm not certain what the actual state of the game is.

Thanks in advance.